Space and form

 Next I want to talk about space and form. Discussion on space and form involves issues of framing and movement. In the discussion about movement, I will talk about perspective, depth, composition, and so on.

　

Framing

 Let me first take up the subject of framing. Why does manga have framing? I will present an illustration of the wall paintings in the Scrovegni Chapel by Giotto (an early Renaissance artist) as one of the origins of framing. The life of Christ is depicted in three rows with some tens of frames placed in each. It adopts the technique of showing square scenes in series. This is not exactly manga, but we can consider it to be an example of origin of framing.

 I say this because the paintings are drawn on the interior wall of a building. A building is basically made up of rectangular square walls, square ceiling, square floor and square windows can be put there. Buildings have many shapes, but basically they all have square walls, ceiling, floor, and maybe square windows. Painting on these walls, in one sense, involves scaling down the shape of the square building and putting several of them next to each other. To me it seems that framing, which divides pictures into squares, cannot be unrelated to space and form of a building.

 We can say that buildings are the bearers and nurturers of all figurative arts. The first ever painting was drawn on a wall of a building. This is related to the fact that the ancient cave wall paintings of Lascaux and Altamira, the origins of painting, were drawn on walls of homes.

 We often experience when we are lying in bed for many days staring at the ceiling, for instance, that at first we only see the ceiling. But if we are really idle what happens is that we begin to see a kind of picture in the stains on the ceiling. If we are even idler, we create a story by combining that picture and another. I think that ancient people stared at a wall and seeing not just a white wall, they envisaged and created paintings in which some kind of story would emerge. This was the origin of painting, which was later enclosed by frames and divided into squares like windows and columns of a building, constituting an origin of framing.

 We can also consider square scenes seen from the finder of a camera or square picture of a film as an origin of framing; but I think the fact that square paintings already existed influenced the establishment of cinema and photographs. So in this sense I regard Giotto's painting as one of the origins of framing.

 Let me present one scene from Takemiya Keiko's Kaze to ki no uta (Poem of the Wind and Trees) as an example of evolution of framing. In the case of Giotto, the story of Christ's life is recounted in frames of same size that are joined together. However, in many cases in girl's manga, this style is deformed and in extreme cases, one character is divided into right and left frames for no apparent reason. This gives a strange effect that enables us to experience movement of a point in space, depth, or flow of time. We sense something precisely because there is a dividing line between the frames. This is an example illustrating how developed the technique of framing is.

 Another example is pop art. There is a manga called Shikuret hato (Secret Heart), though I don't know much about it. An American pop artist called Roy Lichtenstein produced a piece of work using this as a motif. This painting constitutes one style of pop art that has transformed manga into art. The work is huge−1 meter by 1.5 meters−and was exciting in terms of methodology as it enlarged manga into an enormous scale and still managed to be accepted as painting. Of course, it was not simply an enlarged copy. It subtly or boldly changed the positions of speeches, designs and manner of trimming.

 Lichtenstein did not just make an enlargement of manga per se but created a work of art based on manga. This was the same, for instance, as when Cezanne drew a picture with an apple as a motif. Just as a picture of an apple is not the same as an apple, picture of a manga is not the same as a manga. At any rate, the example illustrates that manga is something that is divided by framing or enclosures.

 Lastly, I want to think about what is being expressed by framing. It goes without saying that it expresses a story, that is to say, a flow of time. In Giotto's painting in the Scrovegni Chapel, a flow of several decades of time from Christ's birth to his death is represented from one frame to another. In other words, a frame itself is like a photograph in still motion, but expresses movement as a whole.

 Of course, there are some mangas that express movement inside one frame. Takahashi Rumiko's Uruseiyatsura (Kids from a Noisy Star) is one example. It depicts a scene of someone tripping over while walking along a weird place overgrown with grass.

 There is a movement called futurism in twentieth century art. Marcel Duchamp, for example, belonged to this movement. His Nude Descending a Staircase tries to make movement itself into a painting. Twentieth century painting has made several attempts to overcome the limits of two-dimensional painting. Picasso battled to depict some effects of three or four dimensional space in his paintings. Depiction of movement has been attempted in various ways by artists since futurism, including Marcel Duchamp. But if we think about it, such attempts have already been made in manga, or we could even say it has been completed in manga.

 Let me say a little here about brain science. It is a fact that, the progression of time or movement in space represented by division into frames can be replaced by time in one sense, just as a camera moves in space. This is very similar to what happens inside the brain. The brain is a strange mass of nerves that controls all the senses in the body, but the brain itself does not have sensation. It does not feel pain even if it is poked or gouged out. If we could somehow take the brain out, after that we would not feel anything. We could poke some needles into it and try out all sorts of sensory experiments, which I think would be interesting, but today we are in a manga seminar so I will explain the brain's functions with regards to visual perception.

 There is the eyeball, the brain and visual cortex at the very back of the brain which controls visual perception. What the eyes see are first sent here. The eyes see light and color which are perceived in dots. When seen close up, they are filled with information of the three primary colors like a television monitor.

 This information is rather like information on thin sheets of paper. It is first sent there and then divided into two channels after all kinds of calculation are done on it. One is the 'channel of what', in other words 'what' is seen. It is here that meaning emerges, for example, that 'I'm seeing an apple'.

 The other is 'the channel of where', that is to say, 'where' it is seen and the significance of space emerges here. What we can understand by this is that if the visual cortex is removed, we can no longer see the world. The very ability to see disappears.

 Next, let us suppose we remove certain parts of the brain, for instance. This does not have to be done as medical experimentation on a living person. It can happen that certain parts of the brain are damaged by accident or brain hemorrhage. What happens in these cases is that the person just fails to see space and movement. There are instances when a person is unable to perceive only movement. For example, there was a patient who came to a brain surgeon in Germany. The patient was like any other ordinary person but could not perceive any movement. What this meant in every day life was, for instance, when this person was standing on a road and a car came, he/she heard the sound of the engine quietly at first and then loudly and then the sound of the car going past. He/she could hear the sounds continuously but could not see any movement visually. First he/she saw a small car, then suddenly a few seconds later a large car, and then a few seconds later again the car had already passed by. It was rather like missing frames.

 When I saw the case study of this illness, I thought that this was close to the world of manga frames in which movement disappears. The person who invented manga frames, if I may put it rather crudely, was perhaps in a sense like this (lacked the ability to perceive motion). Of course he was able to see movement in everyday perception, but he had the ability to very much abbreviate movement, or the ability to build a world omitting it. In other words, he had a very developed sense of perceiving movement and could jump from one frame to another without depicting it in manga. He had the ability to freely create and sense something in his brain that was not depicted in manga between the frames. In this sense, I was amazed that the technique of framing in manga in fact is closely related to, or rather corresponds with, the function of the brain.

 Manga also utilizes the sense of voice or sound to a great extent. That is to say, it employs the right temporal lobe of the brain, which bears the function of sound perception. Manga is indeed in between the visual and auditory worlds. If painting can be said to belong to the pure visual world, manga has speech balloons so in a sense it has an auditory world. It also has onomatopoeias, where there are sounds like 'gata' and 'goto'. In other words, we can say that there are many things we can see when the things in the visual world are transferred to the auditory world. I think manga is created and enjoyed by a person who is very sensitive to things that can be seen as things in the visual world are pulled into the world of sounds.

 If we think about it, the shape of Japanese people's heads is laterally elongated while Europeans have vertically elongated heads. Perhaps these characteristics are somehow related to this. In this way, the stimulus that the technique of framing creates is by no means unrelated to the brain and to human cognition.